You won't send us Packing

ON Thursday evening Pauline Murphy went ballroom dancing as usual, hair fleshly done warm smile Firmly in place glamorous as a movie star in her Fur trimmed coat. OF all anger shock, denial, bewilderment, betrayal hers is the one that lingers. If dignity and courage had a human face, this is how they would look.

For 10 of the 17 years she has worked, at Packard, she has been the family breadwinner. On Monday evening, she left work at 4.40 p.m. as usual, "happy as a lark". A few hours later she watched, slack jawed, as an RTE newscaster announced that her family's livelihood was gone. "After the news, the phone never stopped ringing and the next morning, the place was buzzing with meetings. But on Tuesday afternoon, I felt the life going out of me. I just went quiet. I try not to appear upset but there's a fear there ... When you have a husband who's unemployed and two boys depending on you ... yes, I'm afraid."

John Greene's father in law had also been watching television on Monday night I got a call from him saying your job is I couldn't believe it, I couldn't take it in till I saw it myself in the company were clearly at a low ebb John's first thought was that the company was doing a moonlight flit, trying to get out without paying the workers. (So did others, which is why several, of them spent Monday night on the premises.) He even suspected that the company itself had leaked the news but no longer believes that I think the Irish management were just messengers puppets for the past few years anyway. The unions couldn't talk to them because they always had to wait for a response from Coventry. It was all managed at a distance, no one wanted to know us.

Cradling his small daughter in his arms, he looks like a man in shock. "There's a hollow feeling there, an emptiness. We just didn't expect it the way it came.

He has never known a working life outside Packard. His mother worked there, though when he joined the company straight after his Leaving Cert in 1984, he never intended to stay more than a couple of years. What he meant to do was educate himself, take a night course, maybe become a fireman or a prison officer. But 12 years later, he has a two year old daughter, a mortgage on his cosy, well maintained house near the Square, and a wife who has worked part time at the hairdressing salon since the baby was born. He is keen to re train but worries that worthwhile courses now are three to four years long and his redundancy money will only carry him for a year there's a riddle for the task force to begin with but at least John Greene has youth on his side. Last year he noted that of the 350 workers remaining after the June lay offs, only 11 were under the age of 3.

This weekend, that same sick, hollow feeling experienced by Pauline Murphy and John Greene is engulfing another 800 men and women, along with their spouses and children. Many of them have never known unemployment. They live orderly, comfortable lives in pleasant houses with mortgages and cars and the usual commitments of those who have enjoyed a regular wage. But after Packard some of them will never work again. Inevitably, some will despair of their ability or energy to retrain and will buckle under "Packard was a tough place to work there was a lot of standing, it was manually tiring and there was a lot of concentration required. Some of them are just tired," says Gerry Doyle of the local Chamber of Commerce.

Those who are tired or unlucky or not up to the challenge of "re-skilling", will eventually find themselves catapulted into another world, a world of "supplementaries" of grants For uniforms, books, mortgage relief.

Forced to make "the leap from controlling and being able to make their own choices to relying on someone else's intervention," as Anna Lee of the Tallaght Partnership describes it.

If they are full of fear, it is hardly surprising they need look no further than down the road for a first hand view of the devastation wrought by long term unemployment, or even closer to the hone to the plight of colleagues laid off a year ago.

Martin Andrews was one of them. When his number came up last June, he took it on the chin. He had been short listed for a national short story competition and tried to see the lay off as an opportunity, a chance to write full time. But since then his marriage, has broken up and the financial pressures of unemployment have not only stifled his writing but also his confidence with family and friends.

Like many others in Packard, he saw the writing on the wall well before now. But last Monday's events marked a new low in employer employee relations, featuring such a dearth of human decency that even before the workers get down to wrestling with the loss of their livelihoods, they must first deal with the shock of betrayal. "The way it came out was the worst possible way it could have happened," says Anna Lee, who is also the chairwoman of the Combat Poverty Agency. "How you do things does actually matter."

But long before this week's communications fiasco, Packard employees were aware of the implications of their own colleagues being dispatched to India and Coventry to train workers there "Yes, we did get a sense that we were training our successors," says Martin Andrews, "but we were always being reassured no, no, Packard is here for the long haul." Now it looks very like another step in an ongoing act of slow, deliberate betrayal.

Dublin was just a stop gap, John Greene concludes, while factories elsewhere were being set up, "with management trying to get as much work out of us as they could before closing us down". Given the company's predilection for low wage economies, he has no doubt that Coventry will be next.

THE irony is that the Packard blow comes at a time when Tallaght never looked better. It published its first visitors' guide this year. On Thursday, it opened its first business exhibition, show casing local industry, in the Basketball Arena. It now has its own hotel, a first class RTC, seven highly respected secondary schools, and a phenomenally successful shopping centre employing 2,500 and with a catchment area stretching far beyond Tallaght.

South Dublin County Council has opened big, attractive offices beside The Square themselves a community asset and the Regional Hospital is on schedule For completion next year. Meanwhile, attracted by the new vibrancy, companies such as Gilbeys, ABB, United Drug and UPS have moved to the area just a few of the thousand businesses big and small, that carry a Tallaght address and between them employ around 15,000 people.

Tallaght is by any Irish standard a distinct entity, a city in itself with a population of 86,000 third only to Dublin and Cork. The popular image of a wasteland over run by horses, drugs and thuggery is an anachronism. The more complex truth is that there is as much diversity within its borders as in any modern utan centre affluent in parts, a healthy cross section in others, leavened with concentrations of terrible deprivation at the periphery. In Tallaght the divergences are less obvious simply because everything is packed more tightly and the majority of its people and buildings are still well below middle age.

This compactness and youthfulness has its upsides a lack of old, local organisational baggage for example, and a well articulated determination that while the good times may be here for many of them, the others the 7,500 currently on the live register, the Packard workers, the lone parents who make up as much as 40 per cent of residents on a couple of the most deprived estates must not he left behind.

As Kilnamanagh's parish priest was weighing in this week with the offer of his church as a meeting place for Packard work organisations was explaining that one of things that impresses her most about Tallaght is "the capacity of people with differing agendas to hear one another and to concede priorities" to one another. "It's never been a particularly Irish thing" says, "so it's a huge bonus that we can say yes, we don't agree or share the same agenda but we have that ability to come together on the crucial issues without losing our separate identities choices have had to be debated

Agonising band made for example, by the year 2001, there will be a new, young generation of working age of around 21,000. Should the partnership concentrate its meagre resources on planning for them or on alleviating the stress of the 7,500 currently unemployed?

The reluctant consensus appears to be that the young must be the priority. But, [meanwhile, the task of encouraging local men and women into small businesses very much the vision of employment in the future, and nurturing them once in business, continues to be spearheaded by groups, such as Get Tallaght Working (GTW), which has a full time chief executive in Kieron Brennan, and IDA/Chamber of Commerce initiatives.

One of the proud offshoots of GTW is the bright, new Bolbrook Enterprise Centre, opened a year ago by the President, Mrs Robinson. Here, Keith O'Malley manages the NEST two year programme for new, small businesses. "You're talking incredible disadvantage. They have no network, no contacts, no capital, and they have a real problem just getting a current account never mind a loan From the big banks." But the upshot of his hard graft is 67 companies, providing 90 jobs, in just two and a half years.

Michael Deveney of Decorative Wall Plaques echoes the views of many when he says they succeed because the alternative is too terrible "I'm just about holding my own but I'm not going to let it go. I have no option. I can't go back on the dole and stay sane. I couldn't.

Who knows what will happen to Michael Deveney? As well as the help and solidarity offered by NEST, he needs capital. Another riddle for the task force. As Keith O'Malley puts it "We are a light at the end of the tunnel, but there is a tunnel." And the tunnel has been lengthened by Packard "The loss of Packard effectively wipes out three to Four years of slow, focused work like this," says Anna Lee, putting it in context.

"We don't want a knee jerk reaction to Packard," said Councillor Charles O'Connor this week after the announcement of the task Force. "This community is looking for real action. This is about the 800 families who are devastated this weekend but it must also be remembered that last Monday morning, there were already 7,500 on the live register, there were 30,000 young people under 20 years of age, there were 1,000 on schemes. And what they're all saying is where will we get a job in Tallaght?"

Again and again, says Philip Watt of the West Tallaght Resource Centre, the surveys consistently point to the same pressing needs in the severely disadvantaged estates around him facilities for children, opportunities for children and teenagers. These are the needs being articulated by parents, themselves severely disadvantaged, but desperately seeking some hope for their children at least.

Huge unfenced "prairies" are more of a problem than an asset where there are young children who have no safe play areas. Loose horses still roam at will on some of the western estates. And a tiny percentage of "bowsies" continue to give Tallaght a bad name, in the words of Michael Meade, the principal of Brookfield Community School. "But there is a big drive now to take them on," he says. The residents of these areas are falling back on their own resources, producing their own enlightened responses to local problems. Fettercairn's tremendous initiative to handle its own drug problems for instance, is now receiving core funding from the Eastern Health Board.

At around 4 o'clock on any school day, the visitor to Tallaght will get a glimpse of the future. In this one small area, there is the heart stopping sight of some 5,000 young people pouring out of the schools, schools where principals like Billy O'Hara, Aidan Savage and Michael Meade are persuading, cajoling, working to give children an education which the overwhelming majority of parents know to be their only hope.

But the situation is not as bleak as it might appear. One of the statistics bandied around about Tallaght is that 40 per cent of its children leave school before the age of 15. This is simply not true. Looking at the current crop of fifth years in her lovely, bright. 1,000 pupil school, Ms O'Hara reports a retention rate of about 90 per cent at St Mark's (and some of those may simply have moved to other areas). She can also show a creditable record of Further education. Of the 178 who did the Leaving Cert last ye 40 went on to third level education, 82 to pre Leaving Cert course in subjects like secretarial/child care/draughting and design, 40 into apprenticeships, nurse training or CERT, three took a FAS course, six are repeating the Leaving, two emigrated and two weren't answering their phones.

In the more disadvantaged west Tallaght area, in Killinarden Community School with its state of the art computer room, Aidan Savage reports a drop out rate no higher than 15 per cent. All over Tallaght, strong, dedicated men and women have been labouring For years to balance the scales, weighted so heavily against them to begin with. The blow from Packard is severe, but everyone is agreed that the time For analysis is over.

"We are up to our knees in reports", says Breda Cass, Cathaoirleach of South Dublin County Council. "We are analysed to death, it's time for action. Let's have the prescription."